Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages...I proudly present to you, the 2nd annual AlphaMeridian Memorial GESC Chess Tournament, or AMMMGESCCT for short. Like last year, I will be your host, with the wonderful DastardlyOldMan lending me a hand.

There will be minor changes to the rules this year to account for some bumps we ran into last year, but for the most part the rules will be the same, for reference, this is what we did last year:

Each round will last one week, to allow players to schedule their matches.

The match may be played using any medium available.

The match may be played either live or as a correspondence game, as long as it's finished within the week.

Both players will report the result of the match to the tournament administrators, and if possible, provide a transcript of the game.

A win (or Bye) will result in 1 point, a loss 0, and a draw 1/2.

In subsequent rounds, players with equal (or close) scores will be paired against each other, with modifications made by the administrators so that players do not play the same color twice in a row, and they do not play the same player twice.

Every player will play in every round. If we have an odd number of players, the player left out will receive a Bye for that round. Players will not receive more than one Bye for the entire tournament.

The number of rounds will be determined by the number of players signed up to play, at the admins' discretion. At minimum we will play the same number of rounds as a single-elimination tournament would net us, but we may increase it to allow players to play more games.

If too few players sign up, we will switch to a round-robin format.

Disputes will be arbitrated by the tournament directors. If a director is involved in the dispute, they will recuse themselves from participating in the resolution of said dispute. In the event of a dispute between two directors, there will be a fight to the death, livestreamed on twitch.tv.

Intended start date is approximately January 19th. As always, this is about strengthening this community, remembering alpha, and having fun. So there you have it - sign up, and let's play some chess.

Parts of this post may or may not have been plagiarized from pauli, who may or may not have plagiarized it from me in the first place. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Changes to the rules for this year are as follows:

All games must be played on Chess.com except with explicit clearance from the tournament admins.

As a heads-up, for those of you who played in the first tournament (which I imagine will comprise most of the signups) the initial seeding will be done based on last year's ranking. Should get us pretty quickly to the point where everyone's facing evenly-matched opponents.